Coming to adulthood in the nineteen-sixties and -seventies, in an age of scientific, social and political optimism, having been conditioned to believe in the perfectibility of humanity by means of rationality, this boomer belatedly realises that he's been catastrophically misled: this blog charts his efforts to achieve a less vapid, less ego-driven, less dispiritingly parochial optimism.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

The belief that we as individuals are each a brain, a chunk
of matter, a complex 3D object and nothing more is an article of faith in our
materialistic culture, dominated as it is by our physicalist science. It is
confidently declared by pundits and popularisers that 'of course' the mind
equals the brain. But does it? It’s more likely that this belief is no more
than a methodological prejudice, a comforting ploy of the ego to affirm its own
mastery of the situation. We all believe that our minds are distinct from our
brains, so we might as well give the thought its head and see where it takes
us.

It may seem counter-intuitive to consider the mind as
ontologically distinct from the brain – as a different sort of existent, but it
is just as counter-intuitive to try to consider the mind and its events as mere
movements of particles. The 'brain-mind identity' theory is a recent belief
deriving from our obsession with things and a little reflection shows that
no-one actually holds it very seriously – except, that is, when people are
getting on their theoretical hobbyhorse. We all think as dualists, but that may
be because our brains and our language can only deal with objects. It is unlikely
that our brains can handle the whole range of reality; but in addition to
handling objects, our minds can also conceive minds and it is futile to dismiss
this ability as misguided fantasy. On the one hand, our entire culture rests on
the primacy of the object; but on the other it also rests on the primacy of the
individual and on the dignity of the self as a mental entity, whatever that
might mean. The confusion is obvious and deeply-rooted, impacting on our legal
and moral discussion no less than on our science and our religion. So it's
probably time dissenting voices were heard again, since taking the self
seriously, though still unfashionable in academic circles, is a perfectly
legitimate approach to the mind and its development. Thy physicalist talks only of objects and claims to believe that only objects exist; those who talk of minds know with more immediacy than they know anything else that minds exist - it's just that they have constantly to remind themselves when talking of minds that, despite the way it sounds, they are not talking of objects.

The mind is part of our experience, so treating it as if it
were a mind, rather than an object, is good empiricism. Calling mental
experience 'delusory' is actually bad empiricism. Of course this raises
ontological problems, but they are not solved by pronouncing the mind to be
'mere matter'. It raises epistemological problems, too, because as soon as we
stop regarding the mind as an object, it becomes correspondingly more difficult
to be 'objective' about the mind. But prejudging the nature of reality and
declaring minds to be impossible because they are not objects is simply daft. It’s
time we grew out of this childish simplification. Giving the self its own ontological
status, therefore, is just good mental housekeeping. Taking the difference
between the self and the brain as fundamental (as Popper and Eccles did in
their book The Self and its Brain)
involves pursuing the ontological distinction wherever it might lead; and one
direction in which it leads is that which takes us towards considering the self
and its properties introspectively. This might be decried as subjectivism; but
it is possible to remain objective and strictly empirical about subjective
experience. It just requires a bit of caution and a lot of culture.

The brain is like any other organ of the body, a chunk of
stuff that can be treated as a mechanism. As it ages, its mechanical properties
inevitably begin to decline. It becomes sclerous and calcified. It creaks and
groans in protest at the years of routine tasks it has been required to
perform. Its circuits, once so plastic and impatient to learn, become, with
advancing age, rigid in their resistance to the new and in their tendency to
repeat and repeat the actions they performed in the past – particularly if
these actions produced pleasurable or empowering feelings. Then the whole thing
starts to wear out and shut down. The brain begins seriously to fail and its
control over the body becomes less and less efficient. But even in these
circumstances those circuits that have been of significance in the life of the
empirical individual, whose brain it is, may intensify their autonomy and
generate obsessions and manias in the mind of the individual concerned. Old
people can become ‘set in their ways’ and also prone to develop ever more
eccentric, incomprehensibly egoistic or outwardly weird behaviour, as the
diminishing brain circuits that are left to them occupy more and more of their
mental economy and dominate more and more their behaviour. The spectacle of a
demented old person half naked and shouting in public about a confused mania with some incomprehensible link to past experience is not calculated to
inspire optimism about the process of ageing. But we do not necessarily have to
age in order to become obsessive in all sorts of unedifying ways: if we fail to
develop as selves – that is to say grow ‘spiritually’, for want of a better
word – , brain-circuits that have provided us with pleasure or satisfaction in
the past, however trivial, will come increasingly to dominate our waking life
and may lead to the kind of obsessive nastiness that is observable most clearly
– by virtue of the exaggeration – in the psychopaths and deviants that plague
our society with their insanitary idées
fixes.

But is this dismal tale altogether a negative one? My
deepest belief is that it is not. The reason for this is that the negative
developments in the brain may be accompanied and outweighed by entirely
positive developments within a self that is increasingly independent of the
brain. The brain is the seat of the ego,
the organ of survival, of accomplishment in the world, of reproductive success
of increasing power and of all the other areas of interest to the growing and
maturing human individual. The main function of our brain is to guarantee the
survival of our individual body long enough to enable us to reproduce our kind.
The focus of the conscious brain’s activity is the egoistic programme and
egoism is its natural mode of functioning. But all of this is destined to be
slowed by decline and finally to fizzle out altogether. So it is what remains
after the brain has been programmed for success and then worn itself out in the
pursuit and possible achievement of this success that really matters to the
individual. And it’s the real individual we’re talking about here, not some
social role or persona.

There is good evidence to suggest that spiritual growth throughout
a life seems to protect the person in some measure from the effects of
brain-wear. In ageing, the individual, if he or she continues to grow as a
self, naturally detaches him- or herself progressively from the egoistic accomplishments
of life, from its dominant preoccupations and turns inward towards the self. It
is at that point – precisely when the brain is beginning to decline – that the ego
can be relegated to the back seat and the self is able to assert itself, as
long as the retrieval mechanisms are not irrevocably damaged. At this point,
the self can use the vast store of knowledge and experience stocked within the
brain as so many reasons to abandon the life of the organ of success in
preference to cultivating the life of the individual self. It is at this stage
of life that altruism – that mysterious phenomenon of human community – is understood
for what it is: the dawning awareness of the self that it is a vaster mental
terrain that that of the ego. Sometimes
this happens earlier in life as a result of a crisis – a near-death experience
or something similar – but it happens most naturally as a result of ageing.

The positive side of ageing is generally invisible to those
who see only its wear and tear. As brain-dominated egos (or as ego-dominated brains)
we’re so obsessed by judging others according to their value to us, that we
often forget that they have a value to themselves and that this may increase as
their value to others decreases. This value of the self to itself is utterly
different from the value of the ego to itself and wholly independent of the
value of an individual’s brain power to others. The essence of self-awareness
can be seen as the growing consciousness of the self as part of the universal
intelligence of the cosmos. Given that the development of the self seems to separate
itself from and even to go against the functions of the brain, there is no
reason to suppose that the self may not continue to develop beyond the point at
which degeneration of the brain has seriously interrupted the individual's
ability to communicate with the outside world. The moral and spiritual
accumulation of the self requires, as Kant pointed out, that the self in
question have no term set to this development.

Many aspects of the empirical personality, many of its
accomplishments and habits, many of its most treasured intellectual and
emotional possessions, including language itself, have to be abandoned in the
process of ageing; but in abandoning these, the self discovers what is
intrinsic and essential to it. Old age is the stage of life in which contemplation
may take over from action and goal-directed thought; indeed, if it doesn't
there's something wrong. This is the stage at which the self discovers that
though its brain is determined, time-bound, space-bound, hidebound and destined
for inevitable decline, the self is not necessarily any of these. It is the
stage at which mind-thinking begins to diverge from brain thinking - though in
certain creative individuals, this divergence may have happened much earlier.
The self realises as it detaches itself from the brain with its egoistic routines
and habits that it is possibly undetermined, spaceless, timeless and polyvalent.
The sense of liberation is immense. Old age is often a period of cheerful
gallows humour, as the ego declines towards its inevitable demise. The self
begins to develop a hunch, if it continues to grow, that it is not only keyed
into the universal intelligence of the cosmos, as pure, unexpressed potential,
but that its continuing stake in the cosmos is assured. Of course, pursuing the
logic of such a process, the individual becomes aware that the brain not only
will die, but actually has to die in
order for the self to be released; but the wise of every age have known that
death, far from being the end, is a kind of return to the point of departure
that makes possible the liberation of the essential self. Cavafy’s fine poem Ithaca is a description of this
separation process. In this liberation the brain is merely a facilitating
mechanism that has served its purpose and, having done so, become irrelevant.
We are unable to speculate intelligently about the manner of the self’s
persistence, but the accumulations during the period of physical life assure us
of its reality and give us some inking of its onward course. The consignment of
the ego and its ambitions to oblivion seems to be an important precondition of
this unfolding of the self.

For those human beings who find it impossible to transcend
the ego and who remain exclusively attached to the activities of their adult
life, to the memories of pleasures going back to their childhood, to the
feelings of accomplishment, power, reproductive success and so on, nothing
remains to them in ageing but the re-excitation of those brain circuits that
provided them with the experiences of such things. If such individuals never
acquired the spiritual distance, the mental disengagement from the physical,
the discovery of the no-thingness of the essential self, that is at the heart
of all authentic aesthetic, spiritual and religious or mystical experience,
then their fate is sealed and they are destined to decline as selves along with
their declining brain. On the other hand, the development of a spiritual
dimension to the self seems to guarantee that separation from the brain takes
place (the earlier spiritual development began, the easier and more effective
this separation will be) and the self acquires the ability to contemplate the
decline of its body with equanimity as the awareness takes hold that it is only
after the death of the body that the full scope of its potential can be
realised. The ego can only mourn, as its infrastructure, the brain, begins to
decline and as its highest values – those of fostering its own advantage – look
increasingly vain. What more pathetic spectacle than that of the wealthy tycoon
desperately trying to extend his empire and increase his wealth as death
beckons? For the self that has abandoned egoism, however, the sense of
accumulation, of expansion from the centre, that characterises a life devoted
to the cultivation of spiritual values, has at its core the conviction that
such an accumulation not only will not, but cannot be truncated. The death of
the brain along with the death of all that the brain does best is then
understood as an essential element in the process. It is as the brain and the
ego fall away that the oceanic consciousness of the self is free to expand.

The brain is responsible not only for our obsessive,
automatic behaviour, but also for our ritualised actions, our habitual actions,
our skilled actions, in short, for all of our typically egoistic human
behaviour and for most of what people conventionally consider to be the essence
of their personality. In fact, none of that is intrinsic to the essence of the
self but getting rid of all this stuff is obviously challenging, since it feels
a bit like the threat of extinction and is therefore anxiety-inducing.
Nevertheless, the practice of death (Plato’s melete tou thanatou) involves nothing less than this, and getting
used to the process is probably indispensable to a decent old age. Those who
fail to develop a spiritual non-egoistic life risk fizzling out along with
their brain. Spiritual consciousness is post-intellectual, post-linguistic,
post-human. But it is the culminating stage of a coherent process of human
development that is similarly described in numerous old traditions. It is on
the whole vouchsafed to the old, firstly because in the young it would be a
handicap – principally to earning a living, though ascetic passions may arise
spontaneously at any age – and secondly,
because a great deal of experience, skill and time are required to acquire
distance from, and growth out of, the brain.

The human self requires a brain and a programmed brain in
order to develop a full self-consciousness. The development of a fully
functioning ego is vital to the process of transcending that ego. The self
emerges not only out of the experience of an individual lifetime, but also out
of the entire evolutionary history of the species that lies stored up in the
brain. In common with all natural transformations, the husks of former stages
of existence, though they were necessary at the time, fall away and become
redundant. So it is with the brain. Far from being the essence of our self, it
is simply the essence of our humanity and the support structure of our ego; and
as such it has to wither away as the self moves beyond mere human life and
transcends the human condition. Getting stuck in the brain and failing to move
beyond the ego, for whatever reason, failing to develop a spiritual self can
thus be regarded as the greatest of disasters for the individual, since with
the death of the brain, the individual who has not developed as a self may turn
out to be truly dead. The possession of an under- or undeveloped self is almost always advertised by a stridently vociferating ego. But the ego is literally going nowhere. The ego lives and dies with the brain and the energy field
that defines the physical boundaries of the brain and thus of the
brain-dominated personality will be
absorbed into the entire energy field of the cosmos anyway, just as an eddy in
a fast-flowing river gradually fills and disappears. The panic-stricken resistance of the ego
is powerless to stop this. The self, on the other hand, feels no resistance at
all to the prospect of reabsorption, indeed, it desires nothing else.

So for those who may feel stuck in their brain and fed up
with their ego, several stiff drinks, or a dose of some mind-expanding
substance may loosen the bonds and give the self a bit of elbow-room; but these effects are of limited value. There's no
substitute for the development of the creative persistence of that unfathomable
but entirely non-egoistic frame of mind that is frequently referred to –
however inadequately – in phrases such as 'a sense of awe', 'aesthetic
contemplation', 'mystical awareness', the 'oceanic experience' and so on. Such
phrases may strike the empiricist in us as outlandish, pompous or simply absurd,
but they nevertheless point to an archetypal experience of the emerging self
that we do well not to ignore. The entire cultural history of our species, with
its florescence of religion, art and science, is a record of the struggle of
the post-human self to liberate itself from the limitations of the evolved human
brain. Culture itself is an indication that the evolution of our species has
left the realm of the purely physical and moved into the realm of the
immaterial. Every tendency of our species is towards the loosening of the dark
embrace of matter. To have some inkling of the manner in which the brain has
exhausted its usefulness to us is to experience the completest liberation of
the self that is possible this side of death.

Common sense is popularly considered as the infallible guide
to life, the universe and everything; but this is emphatically not so. The
human animal is a creature that is in a type of conflict with itself that leads
it to believe many contradictory things. This conflict is sometimes referred to
as a moral conflict – ‘the things I want to do I don’t do, and the things I
don’t want to do I do’ – and accounted for in terms of friction between social
pressures and individual freedom. It is clear that what is of benefit to the
individual is not necessarily of benefit to the collective. But it seems odd to
suppose that the human animal would invent and go on inventing something –
culture, society – that is in conflict with and even militates against its
essential nature, unless there is an impulse to do so that determines behaviour
in ways that are not strictly ‘selfish’ for want of a better word. But then,
the conflict is not only moral, it is also intellectual. Guilt – and some would
call it ‘existential guilt’ – is a feature of our species, but so is the intellectual
need of members of successive generations to call into question what the
previous generation believed. So rather than trying to find cultural factors or
genetic factors supposedly responsible for this conflict, it is much more
reasonable to speculate that the dissonances we experience as a species are
rather down to a much more primordial tension that is inherent in our own
nature. I am going to stick my neck out and call this:

the conflict between the
brain and the mind.

It is not very fashionable to postulate a distinction
between brain and mind, no more fashionable, indeed, than the distinction
between body and soul. The ‘brain-mind problem’, so-called, is solved by those
seeking scientific respectability by the simple expedient of denying the
existence of the mind, or calling it a mere ‘epiphenomenon’ of the brain –
something like the hum of an electric motor. I have no need of scientific
respectability and care not a fig for fashion, so I’m going to argue for what strikes me as the
clearest explanation for the essential conflict at the heart of human mental
activity and declare that it’s down to the (creative) tension between the brain,
and the mind that uses it. We could call this the conflict between the self and
its brain. The materialistic objections to taking the mind seriously have
evaporated as physics has developed: we simply do not understand what we mean
by ‘matter’ any more. There are clearly levels of reality beyond the material
and there is no point in asserting that mind cannot be considered a reality in
its own right and studied phenomenologically. This is the line to be taken here.
We shall assume not only that mind is distinct from brain but that mind is the
more basic phenomenon and that mind makes use of brain for its expression. The
mind, on this view, is a more capacious concept than that of the brain and the
phenomenology of the mind is correspondingly more complex than that of the
brain. For physicalism, brain event a and
the ‘corresponding’ mind event a’ are one and the same. But there is no particularly good reason for this apart from a correlation that we do not
understand. Brain event a may give
rise to mind event a’; but equally,
mind event a may give rise to brain
event a’. Brain event a may exist without any mind event at
all; but equally mind event a might
exist without any brain event at all. Mind events might thus be prior to and
more complex than brain events. If this view has any merit at, it becomes
possible to see how the brain might be a source of limitation on the mind and how
the mind might be a possible means of transcendence of the brain. The brain may
merely focus the mind; and the mind may well expand the brain.

The brain, we are
told, is an engine tinkered together by the long peregrinations of our
evolutionary past including those of the evolutionary past of all of our non-human forebears. This brain, in common with every other organ of every other
creature, has been sculpted by all the dramas, tragedies, adventures,
catastrophes and accomplishments of our long evolutionary history; and, in
common with brains of other creatures, it is an impressively effective but
sometimes unruly agent. But if we were no more than the sum total of the
operations of our brain thus evolved, we would be creatures without conflict,
like our non-human cousins, whose brains allow them to live in the same manner
generation after generation without inner discord. Far from being impelled to
live life in a certain way and no other, we (modern) humans find it impossible
to live like our parents. We announce to ourselves that there is no essentially
human life at all and that we are whatever we decide to make ourselves into. We
imagine we are completely free to do this, even though, at the same time, we
may hold the doctrine of total behavioural determinism by the brain.

Even a rudimentary knowledge of the history of our species
should suggest to us, without invoking an immaterial self, that our mental
evolution seems to require at the very least some ability of the brain as a
system to modify itself, to stand outside of itself, as it were, and to
criticise its own functioning. It is as
if the software running on the computer, so to speak, were built so as to be
able to re-write itself on a regular basis. We seem as a species always to be
rubbing up against what our brains impel us to do and finding stratagems that
we think might be in some way better – or at least different. That doesn’t much
look like mechanistic determinism and perhaps the ballooning of self-conscious
awareness in our species is the irruption into what appears to us as material
nature of the universal non-material levels of reality. If we take the existence of the
human mind seriously – rather than trying to explain it away – then there is no
reason at all why mind should not be considered to be a universal feature of
realty. The emergence of this reality into the natural world in the form of
self-consciousness can no longer be assumed to be an impossibility, as it was
on the basis of now discredited conceptions of the material constitution of the
world. We don’t necessarily have to go into the realms of Hegelian speculation
concerning the absolute spirit and its emergence into consciousness in the
human being; but we can postulate that universal intelligence achieves
consciousness in the human individual thanks to the complexity of the brain, and that this brain, far from being a perfectly adequate instrument for the expression of this
universal intelligence acts as a restriction against which such intelligence
constantly struggles. This restriction is, it seems, vital to our creativity
and our ingenuity. It is in that sense that we suggest here that human beings
might be in conflict with themselves and that this conflict emerges most
visibly in that battle between our soaring imagination and our common sense.

This contradiction at the heart of our being should make us
reflect that while we might be determined by our brains, there is clearly something
else going on both in our individual consciousness and in the human species as a
whole. The conflict of which we speak is of the very essence of what we are and
is closely related to our restless drive towards accomplishment. It is
responsible for the fact that we have moved in a very short time – speaking in
evolutionary terms – from being no more than savannah-dwelling bipedal ape-like
creatures to being, in our own eyes, masters of the universe. Our volcanic
creativity, our use of language and mathematics, our technological
inventiveness, our political evolution, our poetry and religion – all of these
features of our history are connected to the central conflict of our being. So
what is the nature of this conflict? The suggestion here is that it is down to
a tussle within the human species between the swelling cerebral mass, as a survival-machine
produced by evolution, on the one hand, and the emergence into human
consciousness, on the other, of a level of reality that can only be described
as ‘intelligent mind’ and that may for all we know be as essential a feature of
the universe as matter. It may well be that the brains of mammals had to reach
a certain level of complexity before this became possible, but whatever the
case, there is a chasm between the human species and all other species that is
to some extent explained by the nature of the brain, but that is best explained
by the operation of the mind. We do not need to assume a dualistic structure to
reality, with inexplicable interactions between two apparently irreconcilable
realities, since current theories of physics do not exclude the operation of
the mental in the non-material world of the sub-atomic in ways that cannot be
explained by a purblind insistence upon the primacy of the three-dimensional
object.

If this thesis is true, then we have to assume that
brain-thinking and mind-thinking can be prised apart. Intuitively, this seems
possible. But the difference between brain thinking and mind thinking is perhaps
most clearly evident in the phenomenon of ‘common sense’. Human common sense is
demonstrably a brain function: it is the way we are impelled to think before we
start to reflect on our thinking, before we are even conscious of thinking. Common sense is what appears to humans to be obvious,
self-evident or completely reasonable. For example, there are many perceptual
conclusions that we draw about the world that are ‘obvious’ to us. It is
‘obvious’ to the common sense view that the universe is composed of
three-dimensional objects. It is ‘obvious’ that the world is flat. It is
‘obvious’ that the sun goes around – or at least over – the stationary world
from the east towards the west. It is ‘obvious’ that space has three dimensions
and time is infinitely linear. It is ‘obvious’ that the moon is the same size
as the sun, and so on. Additionally, there are many other common sense
conclusions that we draw that have a moral character and are more subtle. It is
‘obvious’ that I owe a greater duty of care and have a greater moral responsibility
towards my relatives than to non-relatives. It is ‘obvious’ that strangers are to be
treated with suspicion. It is obvious that potential sexual partners are in
themselves attractive. It is ‘obvious’ that aggression from you is to be met
with aggression from me. It is ‘obvious’ that I should strive to maximise my
sphere of influence, my power, my possessions. And so on. These ‘obvious’
matters are of relevance at the forefront of consciousness, but there are a host
of other less conscious to unconscious determinants – some of which emerge when
we discover perceptual illusions, for example – that nudge us towards conclusions that we
find self-evidently correct and that we refer to as ‘common sense’. It is only
when we begin to think about our thinking that these determinants become clear
to us, we become aware of the brain’s influence upon us, and we become able to
modify our behaviour or our knowledge in the light of our own freedom to
criticise our common sense. The growth of culture can almost be seen as our
transcendence of the brain as we become ever more skilled in criticising its
operation and our consequent liberation from our common sense.

Common sense is clearly very fallible and may be dangerous once we adopt
lifestyles more complex than those of hunter-gatherers. What was obvious to our
ancestors served them well; but as we move away from the earth-bound, low
velocity lives they led, we think about our thinking in a way that demonstrates
our ability to think beyond the strictures of our brains. What is obvious now is
that human civilization has taken the species beyond the sort of response to
our environment that we observe in non-human animals, that all of these matters
that are ‘obvious’ to our common sense view of the world are in fact far from
obvious at all and are in other frames of reference mistaken. Modern physics
has substantially destroyed our common sense perceptions of the world around us
and centuries of moral and political evolution of our societies have extensively
modified our common sense moral perceptions, too, since many of them were
unjustifiably discriminatory. So although we still ‘know’ certain things of a
perceptual and moral character – and know them with greater certainty the less
aware we are – we may now have to accept
on the basis of rational argument that we don’t know them at all, that they
arose out of mere brain ‘prejudice’ and that we are indeed mistaken.

The world
is not flat. Space is not three-dimensional. The world is not composed of
three-dimensional objects, my family is not inherently more deserving than strangers,
aggression is not obviously best met by aggression or vengeance, sexual
attraction is a trick of the brain and it is not self-evidently true that I
should always seek to maximise my own advantage. These things are ‘false’; and
the fact that generations of human beings have thought otherwise does not
change that.

So what is going on? What is going on is that our brains
deliver to us a perceptual interpretation of the world along with certain patterns
of thought and patterns of behaviour, on the one hand, that were useful to our
survival as animals among animals, and our minds, with increasing awareness,
find these perceptions and patterns of thought to be inadequate, on the other.
This conflict is of our very essence and the view taken here is that it
indicates the split in our being between mind-thinking, on the one hand, that
is free to criticise and modify its mode of expression, and brain-thinking, on the other that
is not. Brain-thinking is the hard wired bit of our mental economy. Brain-thinking will always impel us to pursue those types of behaviour
that the brain has evolved to equip us for. We will behave like the elk with
its enormous antlers and continue to use our adaptations in ways that lead to
the development of even more effective versions of these assets. But like the
elk, we will discover that these adaptations can be a handicap. Then, in
contrast to the elk, our imagination will reveal to us where our advantage has turned
into a hinderance and allow us to resist the promptings of our brain and its
common sense. Our imagination will suggest to us ways in which we may liberate
ourselves from the determinations of our brain. It is this creative
transcendence of our innate thinking, we suggest, that is the indication of an
intelligence at work in us that is not explained by the functioning of our
brain alone.

Now while this intelligence may not have an evolved physical organ of
expression in each individual human being, it does have an organ of expression
in the totality of cultural institutions of the human species. It is this
cultural organ – what Popper calls ‘World 3’ and what we have called ‘midworld’
– that permits the expression of universal intelligence through the human
species as a whole and through the individual where this individual is, in
turn, cultivated.

Clearly, our common sense reactions to the world are those
reactions that evolution has programmed into our brains as a result of our
struggle for survival. So our common sense is down to the unreconstructed
activity of our brains that operates unopposed in the absence of education and
continues with considerable power even where education has brought it to
consciousness. It seems clear that brain-thinking does not require
consciousness at all. In common sense it is, as it were, as though we were
following the ordinary gradient of brain-activity. In common sense we
experience the mechanisms of our brains acting according to their own
structure. In our common sense conclusions, insofar as these enter our critical
awareness, we ‘catch our brains at it’ and are able with increasing mental
distance to criticise these conclusions. We ‘catch our brains at it’ in all
sorts of situations where we may think that we are acting on reflection but
where in fact our brains are thinking and acting autonomously. This is certainly
the case in the affective aspects of our lives, in our sexual activity, in our
motivation to find food, in our need to maximise the sphere of our power and
influence and so on. But it is also the case in our perceptual interpretation
of our immediate environment, in our locomotion, our judgement of space and time,
our conclusions as to the suitability of a certain type of movement within a
certain terrain and so on.

But the most treacherous operations of our brains in the exercise
of common sense are found in our chains of reasoning based upon common sense
premises and then extrapolated to frame a general principle. For example, we may reason that since our immediate environment seems
full of three-dimensional objects and nothing else is detectable by means of
our senses, then there is nothing else in the universe. We may reason that
since we can get to the top of a tree by means of a ladder, the use of a much
longer ladder will get us to the moon. We may argue that since the world is
clearly composed of three-dimensional objects, thought just has to be a
three-dimensional object. We extrapolate all the time on the basis of common-sense premises and then discover subsequently that such extrapolations are
illegitimate. Only after much trial and error do we finally reassess and
possibly abandon our common sense conclusions. It is for this reason that the
confident empiricist should temper confidence and hasty judgement with caution
and perhaps a little imagination. Empiricism is common sense elevated to the level of the absolute and even common sense should tell the empiricist that thinking like a human being is not necessarily any more absolutely valid than thinking like a tadpole. (The comparison comes from Socrates.)

It is clear that as a species we have always been engaged
upon a long process of modifying or abandoning patterns of thought that were
given to us a priori, as it were, by
the structure of our brains. We have as a species gone beyond the dictates of
our brains in all manner of ways, both perceptual and moral. But we have also
gone beyond our brains in our tendency to call into question and abandon our
own extrapolations from common sense. What, for example, could be less
commonsensical than the discoveries of quantum theory? Or how could an
evolutionarily determined brain come up with the ideas of the Big Bang, black
holes or other exotic states of matter far beyond the scope of any creature’s
experience? So the question is: how does this process of ‘going beyond the
brain’ come about? How do we ‘catch our brains at it’, catch ourselves thinking
according to wobbly brain-supported assumptions, spot the fallacy and correct it? Animals
cannot go beyond their brains. They are stuck with their brains and compelled
to follow what they dictate. The elk has to carry on with its competitive
behaviour that led to the disproportionate growth of its antlers and thus
perhaps damage its future prospects, particularly if it gets stuck in a thicket
while fleeing from wolves. The poor elk is stuck with that fate. We are
apparently the only species that habitually criticises its own evolutionarily
determined patterns of thought and modifies them where they appear to come into
conflict with an expanded conception of reality. How do we do this?

The answer that occurs most insistently is that the human
self-conscious mind is somehow ‘outside’ of or ‘beyond’ the brain and able to
modify its activity from this outside vantage-point. Of course such a
conclusion will draw howls of rage and ferocious opposition from all sorts of
quarters, not least from the materialists and behaviourists. But the simple
riposte to their arguments will often be that their ferocious opposition is
more often than not based upon common sense and that they are not therefore
going to win the argument by simply asserting what the brain compels them to
assert. The empiricist dogma, that only what is experienced by the senses is
known, is patently false. There is no longer any point or any justification in
the assertion that what cannot be experienced by the bodily senses has no
reality. Since that is so, we are entirely justified in following our own
intuitions about our minds where rationally they take us. The empiricists will
assure us that thoughts of God or transcendent minds are merely the
brain-determined craving that our species has for coherent stories about
and coherent meanings to our environment. But the view here is that empiricism
is brain-determined common sense and probably misguided. Stories of gods and
universal meanings arise because of our access to universal intelligence and
not from the structures that our brains have evolved in the course of their
evolution.

The empiricists can not have it all their own way: if thoughts of
God are just aberrations of the brain, then so are thoughts of universal
scientific explanation. For us it is a blind alley to explain any aspect of the
extraordinary effects of human creativity by pointing to this or that bit of the
brain. Our creativity and the imaginative flights of fancy that are at the
heart of our cultural accomplishments, are more intelligently seen as the
emergence into human consciousness – admittedly still in primitive and often
distorted form – of the universal intelligence that generates the cosmos. Moreover, this notion of universal intelligence gives us a sheet anchor to our minds when the business of criticising our brains and our common sense calls into question our cherished assumptions. The empiricists, who must equally criticise common-sense assumptions, have no compass thereafter to guide them on what has to be a trackless mental sea. That is why the empiricists are sometimes so ferocious and why they insist on the exclusive and absolute value of empiricism. The alternative seems to them to be pure irrationality. We at least are able see rationality as universally valid because it is rooted in universal intelligence.

Our creativity arises in our minds and not in our brains. We
know all sorts of things that run counter to common sense and that nevertheless
turn out to be truer than the conclusions of common sense. To take a simple
example: whereas Euclidean geometry was regarded for many centuries as
corresponding to the essential nature of reality, non-Euclidean geometries
dreamt up out of sheer mathematical exuberance
by Gauss, Riemann, Lobachevski and others turned out to correspond much
more precisely to our expanding conception of reality and facilitated the development
of Einstein’s theories of Special and General Relativity as a result. Euclidean
geometry is based on the ‘obvious’ properties of three-dimensional space,
delivered to us to by our brains. And yet we have the ability to think up, in
purely abstract ways, exotic properties of a world we have not experienced but
suspect may just be possible. That such properties later turn out to be
applicable to new features of the material world unsuspected by our common
sense is nothing short of miraculous. The fundamental issue here is that of
human creativity. We get beyond our brains by means of our creative thinking
and we do it with such consistent success that to claim this merely as one part
of the brain talking to another simply fails to convince. The prophets of
naturalism, materialism and determinism will all claim that creativity is
simply brain activity turbocharged by feedback loops created by language or by
cultural pressure. Where it is not so determined, they believe, creativity is
largely accidental. But both language and culture are themselves the results of human creativity over
generations and therefore cannot be called upon to explain creativity. As for
the ‘accident’ theory, in which creativity arises out of random brain-activity,
this is a declaration of ignorance and mere desperation – the scientific
equivalent of the unconvincing ‘god-of-the-gaps’.

Determinism, brain-determinism simply does not work as an account
for human creativity. The easiest and clearest way to account for the manner in
which humanity has consistently and massively altered the functioning of its
own thought, transcended its common sense, is to suppose that the mind is a
broader, larger and more complex phenomenon than the brain and that it is the
action of the mind upon the brain that drives it to transcend its own
limitations while continuing, in many respects, to be tied to them. There is
clearly a two-way process going on: the brain becomes ever more practised in
its functioning as a result of experience; but this conceivably allows the mind
enhanced scope. The mind can be presumed to be far more complex than the brain, just as all possible, but as yet unknown, mathematics is more complex than existing
mathematics. Such complexity could not of course be squared with the notion of
mind as an ‘emergent’ property of the brain, for emergence, though permitting
interactionism, leaves the mind less, and not more, complex than the brain it
uses and from which it supposedly emerges. The only reasonably respectable
conception of mental reality that could allow the mind to be more complex than
the brain is that of panpsychism, according to which mind is a property of the
universe at large and as such predates the emergence of any brain, human or
otherwise. And indeed a conception of the universe that includes intelligent
mind as one of its fundamental properties is not inherently difficult to accept
any more. It is only difficult to accept is if one is ideologically committed
to one or other – or all – of the various eliminative theories that since the
eighteenth century have striven to exclude mind from the universe, first in the
form of a deity and then in any form at all, including that of a human mind.

A universe in which intelligent mind is a fundamental
property may well strike us humans as against common sense and thus as
inconceivable, but it is not more against common sense than quantum theory and
its inconceivability is a result of the limitations of common sense anyway –
limits that we transcend with great regularity. So inconceivability and common
sense are no objections to a theory of universal intelligent mind. Moreover, it
is not as inconceivable as all that, since we know from our most intimate
experience, and against common sense, what is implied by the word ‘mind’ and we
have direct experience of the interaction between mind and the material systems
that make up our bodies. Extrapolating from our own mental experience to the
universe at large is now more justified than extrapolations to the universe at
large of human common-sense intuitions concerning matter. We do not need,
moreover, some unsatisfactory dualistic theory to make the idea of universal
mind comprehensible to ourselves. The world of physical matter is quite complex
enough to include in it mind-like levels of reality. The old idea that matter
had to mean three-dimensional objects has gone forever. Matter is now
understood much more in terms of energy fields than in terms of
three-dimensional objects. There is, therefore, no reason at all, why
intelligent mind should not be an energic feature of the entire universe just
as intelligent mind is a feature of the human being. The world of
three-dimensional objects arises out of a level of reality in which there are
no three-dimensional objects and that level could conceivably be not one, but a
multiplicity of levels, - let’s say a hierarchy of ever more subtle fields
– on one or more of which mind could
operate.

So the distinction between brain-thinking and mind-thinking
is by no means a wild or fantastical idea. The brain is only a
three-dimensional object in terms of our common sense and in terms of the
capacities of the sensory-cognitive apparatus bequeathed to us by evolution, and
we are learning to be ever more critical of all of this. It is not reasonable
to claim, as dyed-in-the-wool materialists do, that thoughts are objects. It
is, however, perfectly reasonable to believe that thoughts are what we think
they are – i.e. thoughts – and to suppose that the history of human culture has
been a progressive liberation of the mind and of human consciousness from the
limitations of the brain. If we had been stuck with our brain and nothing more,
we would arguably be still living in the manner of our hominid ancestors. The
explosive development of human culture and human consciousness is well
accounted for in the speculative theory that the increasingly complex brain
produced by evolution permitted the emergence into human consciousness of the
universal mental levels of reality. If what we understand as the ‘matter’ of
the universe is more a creation of our sensory-cognitive apparatus than
objective reality, and if this material character of the macroscopic world
arises out of a distinctly non-material substrate, then our brains, too, can be
understood as arising out of a non-material substrate, an energy field or
something analogous. Such conceptions are entirely within the bounds of modern
physical possibility. Mental activity will thus always correlate to observable
brain activity, since the two – the mental dimension and the physical – are
aspects of a single reality that in turn is part of the intelligent, mentally
active universe. But correlation is not the same as causation; and it is no
more reasonable to say that the empirically observable electro-chemical
activity of the brain causes the
thoughts than it is to say that the thoughts cause the electro-chemical activity.

Common sense has to be taken with a large pinch of salt. The
brain imposes all manner of mental habits upon us that we do well not to trust,
when it is a question of understanding reality. Reality has to be our guide, not fashionable theory. And whatever else we may know or not know, we know that our minds are real. Much of scientific advance has involved
overturning common sense notions and there is no reason to suppose that this
will not continue as science becomes deeper and investigates ever deeper levels
and wider vistas of phenomena. Science is still too closely linked to common sense. The philosophy of naturalism and its related
ideologies of determinism and materialism arose from a too uncritical reliance
on common sense and therefore on the natural gradient of the brain. Science,
when it comes of age, will take us ever further from our brains and ever deeper
into the mental reality that we are only just beginning to appreciate. But we may have to take mental reality more seriously first. Technology
is taking us ever further from the limitations of our bodies and there is no
reason to suppose that science will not do the same for that bit of our bodies
we call the brain.

Materialism is dead. Determinism is dead. And there is now
no longer any reason to cling to the ideology of naturalism. The mind is the
most difficult entity for science in its present form to understand, precisely
because science is still too dependent on common sense. The self-conscious mind is
even more difficult to understand. Science will have to grow up and evolve new
methods for dealing with the immaterial. But this is not something to fear; nor
is it something radically alien, since art has been dealing with it for centuries.
On the contrary, a liberated science holds out the possibility of vastly
enhanced understanding and vastly expanded vistas of reality. If such
intellectual developments eventually rehabilitate the idea of a deity, then so
be it. The idea of a God is only to be feared if it is shackled to the common
sense of the human brain and all the primitive obsessions that arose from it,
its tribalism, its territoriality, its xenophobia, its naïve
three-dimensionalism and all the rest. The modern atheists rely entirely on
their common sense to deliver their truth. The truth is that the brain has
never delivered any more than a convenient, survival-related truth. The search
for truth is an activity of the mind and that mind, once honestly considered,
leads inevitably to the thought of a universal intelligence.

It is completely obvious that we are limited beings with a
limited conception of reality who are still struggling with the straightjacket
of the brain upon our thought. The question is whether we are definitively
imprisoned within those limits or whether there is a way for us to transcend
them. I have tried to argue that though our brains are determined,
evolutionarily circumscribed structures, our minds give us access to levels of
reality that are not merely material, and therefore we may legitimately
hypothesise that we do have mental access to levels of reality from which our
brains exclude us. Thus the interaction between mind and
brain on the historical level has led to an expansion of our capacities in all
areas, because we rightly suspect that more is going on in the universe than
our brains give us cause to believe. Below the sub-atomic level of reality, we
have no indication from our brains of anything at all: reality shades off into
a mysterious fog or foam of energy. There is no reason, however, why the
hierarchical levels of reality to which we do have access – macroscopic
objects, microscopic objects, atoms, sub-atomic particles etc. – should not be
supported by any number of additional structured levels beyond the sub-atomic,
as David Bohm suspected.

The structure beyond the levels of the sub-atomic
would provide ample accommodation for the presence and operation of any number
of entities that are unknown to us from our sensory experience of the world but
that might be grasped to some extent by us on the basis of our own experience
of the mental. We perceive the world in a particular way; and empiricists will
assert boldly and with breezy optimism that there is nothing else to reality other
than what we experience in that way. That they are mistaken in this is clear not
only from non-scientific culture but also from the progress made by particle
physics. They can also clearly be seen to be mistaken from the simple
observation that they have no account to give and therefore no understanding to
offer of the phenomenon of mind unless they reduce it to a thing. Their account
of mind is an eliminative one: they can only deal with mind by denying its
existence because there is no sensory access to it. They can only study mind by murdering it first. Less ideological thinkers,
however, see clearly that as limited beings, limited by the capacities of our
brains, we are right to suspect that more is going on in the world than we can
understand by empirical means.

The hunch that members of the human species have
always had that something is going on in reality beyond what we perceive, is a
legitimate ground for speculation concerning structures in reality that are not
given to the experience vouchsafed to us by our brains. The easiest conclusion
to draw is that our mental access to levels of reality beyond the physical is
an avenue of communication between those levels and ourselves. It may well be
after all that we have a connection with what has traditionally be called ‘the
divine’ through our mental experience. After all, we can postulate that our
bodies are in causal contact with all the other matter in the universe, so why
should we not suppose that our minds are similarly in contact with a universal
mental reality? It is for this reason that one does well to take the
deliverances of the brain cum grano salis
and to allow the hunches of the mind concerning the complexity of reality to
provide a very much expanded conception of the world than that of the merely
empirical.

Common sense is thinking according to the limitations of the
brain. Poets, prophets, philosophers and imaginative scientists have always
suspected that there is more to the world than meets the eye – and brain – and indeed followed strong hunches as to what
that ‘more’ might be. There is no reason why we should bow to the bullying dogmatism
of the empiricists when the world patently is so much more wonderful than they
allow and becomes yet more so with every new discovery that expands our consciousness. Expansion
of consciousness and spirituality are related concepts. If spirituality means
anything at all, then it involves some aspect of humanity that is not tied to
the empirically observable brain. The brain dies and decomposes - that is the
universal lot of evolved creatures. That much we do know. If any spirituality
that may be achieved simply died with the brain, it would be a waste of time to
pursue and accumulate it. All the religious traditions of the world suggest
that spiritual growth involves progressive departure from those patterns of
behaviour that seem to be programmed into the brain of the species.
Spirituality is a matter of increased individuation – or perhaps it should be
‘dividuation’ – and a diminution of those features of the personality that are
merely human. It is a departure from the attitude to the world governed by
common sense. We are no longer justified in dismissing the fact that humanity
has always suspected the mind and body to be separable with the former
providing the locus and focus of onward growth. There is no reason to assume, except
on merely common sense grounds, that the death of the body annihilates the
gains made by the mind. Such a possibility is entirely compatible with our
present understanding of the world and of the information that structures it.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

We inhabit a culture in which things are of consummate value
and in which the mind as an entity is not taken seriously. This is an anomalous
situation since we do in fact take minds seriously in our relations to other
human beings, in our legal system, in our art, religion, ethical reflection and
indeed in every context in which consideration of the person without any
attempt at reduction is vital. But then as soon as any theoretical discussion
of mental events arises, we fall back with tedious knee-jerk predictability on scientific
mantras to the effect that mind is ‘of course’ nothing but brain. There is a
deep-seated fear in our culture of appearing to take the mind seriously as mind,
but the simple and obvious reason for this is that we are unable to talk of anything but objects. We are
hidebound by this convention even though we know in our deepest being that
there is more to us than mere tangible things. So the intention here, and in
subsequent posts, will be to follow the consequences of taking the existence of
the mind seriously. Taking the mind seriously involves having the courage of
our convictions and allowing what strikes us as completely obvious (until we
begin to theorise) to impose certain types of conclusion. The essence of these
conclusions is to allow, without prejudging the issue on theoretical grounds,
that the mental is a form of existence in its own right and can be treated as a
real aspect of the world. Once this is allowed, a host of consequences begin to
flow – most of which will be unacceptable to the physicalist and materialist
assumptions of the neuro-scientific and biological establishment –, the most fundamental
of which is the postulation of a real distinction between those aspects of our
being that are brain-determined, and those aspects of our being that are not.

The trouble with all talk of minds, selves, souls, persons,
psyches, and so on, is that although the existence of such is obvious to us
from our own intimate experience, we are not equipped by our brain even to
think of such putative entities, let alone talk of them. Evolution gave us a
brain honed for our survival in a world of hard knocks and has thereby equipped
us to think of things with great precision and clarity. We do this wonderfully
well. Our discrimination between things
and between parts of things is magnificent, but the downside of this is that we
can think with any precision only of
things. Having adapted us to perceive and handle things mentally, evolution
also gave us the massive handicap of preventing us from mentally manipulating
anything else with the same degree of lucidity. The result of this is that we
have powerful hunches concerning entities in the universe that simply cannot be
things and yet we tend to reify them nevertheless because that is how our mental
apparatus works best. And yet we are clearly able to get beyond our own
obsession with the 3D object. Our minds have persistently grappled with the
non-physical and physicists have recently come up with the startling thesis
that things might not exist in the way we believe, that the fundamental levels
of reality cannot be thought of as material. So while we are apparently handicapped
by our innate empiricism, we also, surprisingly, have the means to overcome this
handicap, at least to some extent. The belief here is that it is the possession
of a mind, distinct from its brain, that not only allows us to perform such
feats but that drives us towards them. While the brain convinces us that the
world has to be thought of as a collection of objects, the mind tells us a
different tale.

The postulation of two separate substances – mind and matter
– is as misguided as the reduction of the one to the other. It is futile to
commit ourselves to some metaphysics of mind or matter because such a policy
entails prejudging what can and cannot be the case, and this practice has
notoriously failed in the history of thought. We have to work with experience and it is unnecessary to
pontificate on what can or cannot come into its purview. As ‘thinking things’
to use Descartes’s phrase, rather than as bodies, we immediately suspect that
we are not ourselves things, or at least that we are rather special things
lacking the most obvious properties of the things of our sensory experience: three
dimensional geometry, solidity, space occupancy and so on. The result of this
most crucial aspect of our experience is that though our sensory experience
provides us only with notions of yet more 3D things, our experience of the self
(Hume was simply wrong in believing that we do not have any) provides us with
at least one example of an entity in the world which is not a 3D thing. We try
to get around this problem in ways that are illustrative of our evolutionarily
determined handicap: we reify the self. We either imagine that the self is a
special kind of thing (a ‘substance’, a ‘subtle
body’ a ‘soul’, ‘ a mind’ etc.) which we imagine we understand on analogy with
the 3D thing of our sensory experience; but the difficulties are
insurmountable and we get into insoluble
muddles because of category errors. Small wonder then that the materialists and
physicalists, who rely absolutely on our brain-determined tendency to think
only of 3D things and regard it as completely authoritative, continue with Hume
and the Behaviourists to deny the existence of a self completely.

But once one has realised that belief in 3D objects is something
that is forced upon us by our brains, something that we have
to entertain because of our sensory-cognitive apparatus, it is surely
legitimate to reflect that our primary experience of the self may well be a
reason for learning to believe that not only may 3D things be possibly the illusory, but that our minds conceivably reveal a feature or
property of reality that our object-obsessed thinking cannot deal with: its
mental or non material nature. We may legitimately begin to reflect that our
mental experience gives us access to levels of reality that our brain-imposed thinking
about things cannot cope with. We may then proceed to reflect that contrary to
the deliverances of our sensory-cognitive apparatus, things do not exist at
all, but that reality is perhaps intrinsically mental. If things have no real
existence beyond our belief in them, if things are constructions of our minds,
then minds are possibly primary and the one we possess may be our particular
access to levels of reality that transcend our ability to think or talk about.
On the other hand, we may not have to go this far, for this is an extreme view.
There may well be a rational middle ground between the old alternatives of
materialism and idealism.

Given the state of modern physics and its non-material
conception of the fundamental levels of the material world of our sensory experience,
I can see nothing wrong in:

a) believing in mind as a reality on the basis of our raw
and fundamental experience of it;

b) rejecting materialism and physicalism as creations of our
particular cognitive handicap; and

c) assuming that as the basis of our very existence, mind is
a fundamental aspect of reality.

Pontificating on what can and cannot exist in the universe
is a risky and unwise business. The universe is not as small as we are and not
as limited as our sensory-cognitive apparatus would lead us to suppose; and our
minds are prima facie evidence that
reality is more complex than our brains allow us to imagine. To dismiss thinking
of the mindlike properties of the universe as a ‘category error’ or
‘epiphenomenon’ or to dismiss it by some such effort to discredit the notion merely
demonstrates the power of our tendency to think in terms of 3D things alone. It
is mistaking a handicap for an absolutely valid and exhaustive set of
assumptions. It is as unjustified as declaring that non-visible electromagnetic
radiation does not exist because we cannot see it. We need to liberate our
thought and concede that we have in the experience of our own minds reason enough
to conclude that our thinking in terms of 3D things is now leading us astray
and should be held more lightly, if not abandoned. The development of a little
discipline in conceiving non-material reality would be of great benefit. This is
indeed done with reasonable rigour by studying in an unprejudiced way the
wealth of stored insight found in religious and poetic language across the
world and throughout the ages. The problem is that official science does not
take such studies seriously because their conclusions cannot be reduced to
things and their uses.

We think of things, we love things, we delight in making
more things, in amassing things but fundamentally we know that we ourselves are
emphatically not things. We, as selves, are fundamentally different from
things. So much is clear to us in the differing values we place on items of our
experience. The entity of highest value is unquestionably the self. Though as bodies we are things, we know as a
feature of our most fundamental experience that the self cannot be a thing or a
collection of things. This dichotomy at the heart of our being is the origin of
all thought of a religious or poetic nature. It was this that led Kant to
propose thinking of the world in terms of phenomena
– or things accessible to our senses – and noumena,
or entities not accessible to our sense (called by him - with
a reificatory impulse that is quite characteristic of us - ‘things in themselves’). We cannot escape
from the immaterial mind and maybe the immediate reality of the immaterial in
our conscious awareness is our entrance into levels of reality that are above
and beyond or behind the material presented to us by our brains. Maybe it is
not just our possession of minds that gives us our obsession with the
spiritual, the psychic and so on, but also our position at the edge of
dimensions of reality that have always been there but that now we can begin to
conceive.

In the book The Self
and its Brain (Routledge London 2000) by the philosopher Karl Popper and
the neuro-scientist John Eccles, Popper takes the mind seriously in that it has
causal effects upon the world of matter that cannot be reduced to purely
material causes. He accounts for the mind as an ‘emergent’ phenomenon, a
reality that has ‘emerged’ from the process of evolution as a reality in its
own right and that has in its turn given rise to the additional ‘emergent
phenomenon’ of what he calls ‘World 3’ – that is to say culture and language.
But he refuses to concede that mind might be a constant and universal feature
of the universe. It is difficult to see why he is opposed to such a notion –
called by him ‘panpsychism’ – for emergent entities with their own ontological
status are no easier to understand than universal mind. His refutation of
panpsychism in his section of the book (cf pp 67-71) is weak and half-hearted;
and his own notion of an emergent phenomenon is no easier to understand than
that of a universal mind. One must assume that his hostility to the notion of a
universal mental reality – with which his fellow author Eccles has no problem
at all – arises from his inability to shake off entirely the effects of his
early devotion to Logical Positivism. At all events this book allows one to
begin thinking in terms of a non-material mind; and once this is allowed (why
should it not be?) it becomes clear that it is impossible to understand the
human without postulating an immaterial self – with its own class of mental
events – on the one hand, allied to a physical brain, which provides us with
its particular class of mental experiences, on the other. Put crudely,
brain-thinking is distinct from mind-thinking, the self is distinct from and to
a real extent independent of its brain, and understanding this is vital if we
are to grasp the essential features of our nature.